Selfless Genes: A New Revolution in Biology

Can selfless genes beat selfish genes?

In 2006, I attended the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Austin, Texas and listened to E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology and one of the greatest biologists since Darwin, deliver the keynote address. Wilson, about 75 years old at the time, didn’t come to Austin to play the grand old man. He came to pick a fight. When it was over, a buzz of excitement filled the room: "Did he really just call selfish gene theory ‘a monumental mistake?'" Yes he did. And he repeats the charge in his fascinating and controversial new book, The Social Conquest of the Earth.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s evolutionary biologists celebrated a fundamental breakthrough. William Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory (aka selfish gene theory) indicated that organisms are narrowly "designed" to spread copies of their own genes, whether those genes are located in their own bodies or in the bodies of their relatives. Hamilton’s work seemed to show exactly how evolution worked, and also how it didn't work. Group selection, the idea that competition between groups of organisms shapes genomes, was declared dead. In effect, this defined altruism, real and authentic selflessness, out of existence. On a planet ruled by selfish genes, “altruism” was just masked selfishness. The biologist Michael Ghiselin expressed this beautifully, "Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed."

The Selfish People

Let’s run a quick thought experiment to see how biologists reached this conclusion. Imagine that long before people spread out of Africa there was a tribe called The Selfless People who lived on an isolated island off the African coast. The Selfless People were instinctive altruists, and their world was an Eden.

But then there was the fall. A genetic mutation produced a single tribesman who was naughty, not nice. He had a simple prime directive encoded in his DNA: Look out for number one (and for your kin folk, and perhaps your allies, but only if you’re sure they’ll reciprocate). The tribesman had selfish genes.

The biological definition of selfishness: behavior that promotes one's own reproductive success.

The biological definition of selflessness: behavior that promotes someone else's reproductive success at the expense of one's own.

The single tribesman with selfish genes would--by definition--leave more descendants behind, eventually crowding altruistic traits out of the gene pool. The Selfless People would become The Selfish People.

The big 1960s breakthrough was simply this: selfish genes beat selfless genes; they beat them bloody; they beat them every single time.

The Selfless People

For a generation, this logic ruled evolutionary biology, and especially evolutionary psychology. But most of the biologists who were responsible for the 1960s breakthrough have gradually backed off their positions (the major hold out is Richard Dawkins, who writes that the "great heresy" of group selection "really is wrong").

Our thought experiment played out the way it had to. But that's because it had one unrealistic component: The Selfless People live in total isolation from all other tribes. And this isolation makes all the difference.

Now, let's run the thought experiment more realistically. This time the Selfless People live in a rich African valley that they share with another tribe. The two tribes frequently come into conflict over hunting grounds, old grudges, and insults barked across the river. And so the tribes fight, as tribes of men have always fought.

Imagine that the valley's second tribe is comprised mainly of selfish actors. Other factors held equal, who wins: the tribe of self-sacrificing altruists or the tribe where every warrior is looking out for number one? Won't it be the Selfless People? Won't the Selfless People tend to dominate selfish tribes in most competitive situations? And, as a result, won't selfless genes proliferate?

Charles Darwin thought so. In The Descent of Man, Darwin ran his own thought experiment, pitting selfless against selfish tribes:

"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection."

Here, Darwin describes how group-level competition can produce authentic altruism. In The Social Conquest of the Earth, Wilson updates Darwin’s case, mainly drawing on his expertise as an entomologist. Wilson argues that the incredible levels of cooperation and altruism within ant colonies testify to millions of years of vicious conflict between colonies. Darwin and Wilson agree: no matter the species, if you have intense and sustained group-level conflict, selfless genes beat selfish genes; they beat them bloody; they beat them every single time.

Of course, it would be a great distortion to suggest that people are, like ants, selfless all of the time. But the vision of rigid selfishness that arose from biology’s rejection of group selection was an equally great distortion. The real picture is more complex. Natural selection occurs at the level of groups and individuals. Competition between groups favors selfless genes while competition inside groups favors selfish genes. As Wilson and a colleague wrote in a different publication, "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary."

All organism today work for themselves. Anything else is an evolutionary failure and a reproductive dead end.

Working for oneself may mean different things, because we are different. It may mean working for your interests of getting a lot of money or working for your interest of helping people in Africa. If it doesn't work towards your interests, humans or other animal, there are no species built around doing it.

Any organism that continuously feeds itself to lions because it wants to help the lion is an evolutionary dead end and all such humans f.ex. and all other animals that I know of with such tendencies has either never been produced or died.

An evolutionary creature that doesn't have it own best interest in mind, whatever that interest is, f.ex. for humans to help poor people or murder many people, whatever, is an evolutionary failure and will soon die out because it treats any threat as more important than oneself and thus falls over till all is extinct.

You basically don't, at least evolutionary wise, want to make a creature that doesn't fight for itself and it's own interests, whatever those interests are. It's a recipe made for going down.

There is ample evidence across many diverse species that cooperative behavior is far more prevalent than selfish behavior -- http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Altruism-Cooperation-Developments-Primatology/dp/1441995196/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333982505&sr=1-1-spell -- http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Justice-Moral-Lives-Animals/dp/0226041638/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333982533&sr=1-2-fkmr0 -- http://www.amazon.com/The-Animal-Manifesto-Expanding-Compassion/dp/1577316495/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_c -- and that humans are "Born to be good" - http://www.amazon.com/Born-Be-Good-Science-Meaningful/dp/0393337138/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333982608&sr=1-1 -- we shouldn't be blaming our destructive behavior on other animals - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201201/what-were-wars-dont-blame-other-animals-human-violence --

No matter how many times this bad idea gets put down, someone always keeps trying to bring it back to life.

One of the many reasons group selection doesn't work is a simple matter of math: you can never go from 1 to 2 by way of subtraction. More specifically, genes don't spread through the population by benefiting non-related others at an expense to the bearer. To demonstrate group selection, that's precisely the fitness logic you'd need to show.

Now let's say a new mutation arose in a population that cause the organism bearing that mutation to act slightly more altruistically towards members of its group despite those acts being detrimental on an inclusive fitness level. Would anyone in favor of group selection please explain how that trait spreads from its bearer to the larger group?

That's not some trivial point; most models of group selection begin by making a ton of assumptions, among them that a sizable portion of the population are already acting this way, without ever explaining how the population came to be consist of them in the first place. Even this article does it, by assuming groups of selfless people just sort of exist.

Secondly, I don't know what is supposed to be meant by "real" altruism. Saying our other-regarding emotions are somehow "fake" because, ultimately, they arose through reproductive benefits, is like saying our love of music or the taste of chocolate are "fake", for the same reason. It blurs the line between proximate and ultimate explanations.

The current, prevailing view in evolutionary biology is that individual and group selection aren't incompatible, but may operate at different scales. See the later writings of SJ Gould for this synthesis and his beautiful description of hierarchical selection, under which different levels of selection (individual, population, species, clade) operate at different scales. For a nice summary of his views and of the debate in evolutionary science, see: R York and B Clark (2011). The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould. pp 93-107.

Altruistic genes can spread through out a population in at least one way. If the bearer of the altruistic genes likes helping other individuals, but strongly dislikes selfish "nasty" individuals, then that would promote the survival of altruistic individuals as a whole. We see that in our society. For instance, I hate helping selfish pieces of garbage. I love to help other nice people, and I would love even more to have a nice person as my mate. I'm sure there are other ways. I'm not thinking too hard about this, but I know for a fact that group selection is a real thing that happens. How do I know this? An ant colony is an obvious example. A less obvious example is your own body. Your body is a society in its own right. All kinds of different cells and different kinds of bacteria all live together in your body "selflessly" contributing to the survival of the whole. I don't know how exactly selfless genes were selected for in the individuals that make up these groups, but I know that they were, so I know that this is a real thing that happens.